


Touching the Void

by Claudia_flies



Series: Stone Quartet [4]
Category: Van Helsing (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Dubious Consent, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:36:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3243212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Claudia_flies/pseuds/Claudia_flies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Dracula's mind games Anna is lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touching the Void

After All Hallows Eve Gabriel prowls in the house like a caged animal, and even Carl will not be near him. Anna is tired, her head and heart empty. She still feels the whirling dance hall around her and the cold hands of the undead. Dracula did not drain her blood that night; did not make her one of his kin. She sits in the library, has for the past days since they returned to Vaseria, her lips dry and pale. He did not drain her blood, but his fingers buried themselves into her mind like pinpricks of stone and she does not know how to purge them out. She reads the thin manuscripts of Valerious the Elder without understanding a word. His writing is spidery and spiky and sometimes Anna thinks that the letter will puncture through her fingers and bleed out all that is left of her, maybe they will drain him out of her as well.   
  
At night when she curls into the chair in the corner, books piled atop one another like walls around her, she thinks that maybe it would have been better that way. Is it not better to be dead than half-alive? The books stare at her silently; their spines thick and ancient and they have no answers for her.   
  
Sometimes Carl comes in and reads with her. He turns the pages fast and Anna knows that the letters won’t make his fingers bleed. He mumbles and curses and taps his fingers against the table. Anna just wishes that he would leave.   
  
Gabriel never comes into the library. He stands by the door, and watches her with his almost-wolf eyes and sometimes Anna wonders if he can see through her, if he can see the blood draining away and leaving her pale and void. She wonders if he is waiting for her to die.   
  
She has fallen asleep by the table, and the stale smell of the book invades her dreams, they are now stale and thin like the books and she can never remember them in the morning. She wakes up to his palm on the back of her head and coughs, her lungs filled with book-dust. He does not speak, but his fingers are steel-like over her spine. He pulls her out of her chair, pushing her torso flat on the table. She goes with his motions like a marionette on a string. Her head rests against the solid wood and she reads the titles of the books piled on the edge of the desk, their Latin names meaning nothing, while his palms shove her gown up and over her back. His fingers spread themselves over her spine, and he growls something against the back of her neck, but Anna does not catch the words.  
  
Then his palms spread her open, fingers travelling over her folds and sensitive skin. Part of her wants to blush and push him away, but she is too tired to feel shame, too tired to fight back. Her body merely opens under his hands and she grins to the old books and their tough spines. She is not like them, not impenetrable history, but flesh and blood and human, and if sensing her thoughts Gabriel pushes into her. The pain is sharp, like pulling her thumb on an edge of a blade, and it blossoms inside of her, blood finally seeping into her veins and down her legs. She spreads her fingers on the wood and presses down. She wants to feel all of it, and lets him ride her like a cheap circus trick just because he is making her feel.  
  
The windows are black and crusted with snow and she catches a sight of them in the dark glass. Gabriel with his teeth bared and hand buried in her hair, and her with her breasts hanging out from her night gown like a harlot and lips bitten into bloody strips. Her fingers try to bury themselves into the wood and she starts to push back against Gabriel’s insistent rhythm. Watching herself move in the reflection on the glass.   
  
_I must be here. He is touching me so I must still be alive_.   
  
The thought is so raw that she has to close her eyes against it, lest it shows in the glass, in her face. And then through the pain pleasure blossoms; and it is harder to bear than the pain, harder and more real. She cries and moans into the wood, teeth bared and lips grazing the polished surface. She does not know if he hears her as his thrusts slow down. She grapples and strains for leverage, her fingers red against the wood. She swears and threatens him, her voice rough and unused. But he won’t listen to her pleas, his fingers slowly travelling up her thigh and pushing her knee over the edge of the table. Anna feels herself spreading, open and vulnerable in a way she never was for Dracula. Gabriel’s hands stroke her back as he moves, and Anna starts to cry. Her body shakes and bucks and shivers.   
  
Gabriel lies down against her back, spread over her like a blanket. And she realises he had never stopped speaking to her, his voice low and through the rumble she hears her name, insistent and painful, like the promises he will never make to her. But her body is not ready, it quakes and she begs him through her tears. Long, shuddering  _pleasepleaseplease_  absorbed into the walls of the library, and finally he kisses her shoulder through the fabric of her gown, and the weight of him disappears. The palm of his hand pushes her back, holding her immobile and he begins to thrust again. Anna hovers on the edge of the pain and pleasure, and her feet clench against the carpet and air.  
  
Afterwards he carries her to his bed. His whispers never still against her ear, he speaks about Budapest, of the monster and of how beautiful she looked in red. His bed smells of wolf and of the earth. He murmurs against her breasts and takes her again with her hair hanging over the edge of the mattress.   
  
And slowly Anna Valerious starts to wake up. 


End file.
